HeapSort : Java Glossary

Williams and Floyd’s sorting algorithm that models employees jockeying for
position on the corporate ladder. Another analogy is a tennis tournament where
winners of low level contests (comparing bigness of key) compete at the next higher
level. In Java, HeapSort is faster than QuickSort
but slower than RadixSort. HeapSort is unstable in that it sometimes disturbs the order of
existing records with equal keys. You can turn it into a stable sort by appending the
existing order as a minor key. HeapSort is
particularly fast if the data are already almost sorted. Free source code is available to download. To learn
more about HeapSort’s behaviour: